Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  Little remained to complete the industrial process—complete inflation; a computerized weighing to ascertain that the inflated football was within a fraction of an ounce of the regulation weight; a mechanized painting on of the white circles or half-circles at the football tips; a visual inspection and sorting into flawed and flawless; and the packaging of the flawless balls into individual boxes decorated with company slogans and images of athletic heroics.

  The dignitary was allowed to hold a football. It felt good, weightless and taut, with that remembered ballistic urgency. In his own high school, thirty-five years ago, he had played second-string end. The occasional catch, but he couldn’t stand up to the battering, the blocking and being blocked, the merciless crowd noise, the pressure. Now he felt another sort of pressure; something was expected of him. “Why is it called a pigskin?” he asked the floor manager.

  The man’s sallow face was slightly plump, with a disagreeable deep dimple in the center of his chin, and an asymmetry to the eyes that would have led an inspector to toss his head into the reject barrel. The rejects, it had been explained, were not thrown out as trash but marketed at a lesser price—to old-fashioned poor boys in patched knickers, the dignitary imagined, and to inner-city high schools on slashed budgets.

  The floor manager smiled thinly, as if the dignitary had once again fulfilled his unpleasant expectations. “People always ask that,” he said, “and, you know, I’ve never looked up the answer. They must have been made of pigskin once, but ever since I’ve been in this business it’s been cowhide pure and simple. If you take a look ever at pigskin, it’s not at all suitable. No grip on it. No grip at all.”

  The dignitary nodded politely, but his thoughts and his gaze kept wandering back to the turners, spotlit at the center of the vast factory like a chorus line gone mad, the lack of synchronization in their precise, strenuous movements making it dreadful, each man alone with his demon, his recalcitrant football, wrestling eternally with his individual sins. Each man wore a shirt aggressively stylized, like the costumes of criminals—one T-shirt bearing a big lavender-lidded Madonna, another the slogan BORN TO LOSE, and a third a tie-dye of lichenlike circular overlappings. One man, the only black, had a shaved head, and the whites tended to have hair long in the fashions of the outmoded Sixties, in a pony-tail or straggling to the shoulders. Several had Pancho Villa mustaches, and others displayed blotchy purple tattoos. The strength of these men! How much evening beer must it take to drown these eight hours, to recharge these aching muscles! Not all were in their first youth, but as a group they were younger than the lacers, who bent into their own repetitive torment with a cagier power, with a thrusting crouch, their right arms flailing.

  “How much does an experienced worker earn?” the dignitary asked, feeling increasingly dreamlike. Lowering his eyes from the distant row of radiant, revolving turners, he discovered almost at his feet a pool of peace. Next to a striped I-beam pillar a coffee urn had been set up, with Styrofoam cups, and a few metal folding chairs were scattered about; here the workers could take a break. Several women were seated here, among them the lissome pale Art Nouveau beauty whom, a half-hour ago, the dignitary had watched stamping hides into football fourths. Beneath him now she was wearily smoking a cigarette and brushing a wisp of her stubbornly curly blond hair back into her red polka-dot kerchief. In his mind he bent down and asked her to marry him. She looked up, her blue eyes a bit faded and dull and cautious, and, with less surprise and gratitude than he had expected, consented. Her voice exposed the flat rural accent of the region; though not old, she had been knocked about enough to be guarded in her enthusiasm about anything. She had sensed his love, back there at her machine, through all the noise, like a stitch through leather.

  They left the factory hand in hand, the inhuman clatter fading behind them, and found a split-level ranch house with aluminum siding, a kind of open combination living/dining room upstairs and a cozy depressed den below it where they put the television set and had a fireplace. They were very happy. She returned to the factory after their honeymoon on a charter flight to Las Vegas, and he loved the way she would bring home on her body every evening the smells not only of sweat and cigarettes and coffee and machine oil but of raw leather. The scent of cowhide, of vast sage-flavored grazing spaces, wafted permanently from her delicate hands. She kept her nails close-clipped, so that her fingers had a grublike and guileless look; he never failed to be stirred under their indolent, tired, fragrant touch. They had two or three kids, to add to the child she had had at seventeen by that bastard of a first husband, and on Saturday nights would weave and shriek their way home bloated with beer and chili in their battered pickup truck. Even into her middle age, when she got dressed up, she had a smudgy-eyed, high-hipped glamour in her satiny turquoise slacks with pegged ankles and slingback spikes, her kinky long hair careless down her touchingly thin back.

  Their first years, he sat home with the babies, and now and then went off to fulfill a speaking or consulting engagement that had been contracted for in his old life; but as the invitations and his savings dried up, he succumbed to her offhand but repeated suggestion that he might find work at the factory too. He became—one of the oldest men ever successfully to do so—a turner. The work itself was curiously rejuvenating, and after those first nightmare weeks, when it seemed every night as though he might die of weariness and shoulder pain, his body developed the muscles and his brain the peculiar furious torpor that the job required. His upper body became lumpy with muscle, and he woke each day to the bliss of knowing he didn’t have to be polite to anyone. His tattoos spread; he lost his front teeth in a bar fight. His dreams as he lay beside her pale, lightly sweating slenderness were of strenuously turning things inside out and revealing the glory hidden within every pebbled, scarred, tough exterior.

  “Strictly piecework,” the floor manager was explaining to him, in answer to his question. “If they want to take a break for coffee, they can do it at their own expense.”

  “And how much, at those rates, can a skilled worker earn?”

  These were not questions the man enjoyed answering. He said grudgingly, “Oh, an experienced topflight stitcher on one of the big machines, for example, after the deductions for benefits and withholding, might take home upwards of three hundred a week.”

  The dignitary made a rapid calculation. He earned four months’ worth of such work with a single speech at a big-city chamber of commerce.

  The mayor had begun to glance at his watch, and the press photographer had sealed his cameras up in their big-nosed hoods of black plastic. The group gave only cursory attention to the machine, a tall vertical metal cabinet somewhat like a French pissoir, wherein footballs were masked and automatically received, with a sharp hiss, their spray-painted circular or semicircular stripes. After the wonders that they had seen, the operation seemed trivial.

  Back in the president’s office, the silence was eerie. One’s head felt light without the helmet and the goggles. The president had put on his suit coat for the little ceremony of saying goodbye. Pink with pleasure, he presented the dignitary with a pair of cufflinks in the shape of footballs—bronze, however, and not gold, like his own. “Was it what you expected?” he asked.

  “Not at all. It was much more”—the dignitary searched, trying to find the exact word, for what made him so good (he had been told) at these ceremonious occasions was that extra particle of courtesy he brought, that focused willingness to make a small gem of most the transient event—“divertissant.”

  The word seemed wasted on the president. “We’ve pretty well trimmed all the fat out of the operation,” the portly man stated. “That’s what we’re proudest of.”

  “He loved the turners,” the floor manager said, with a chortle on the verge, the dignitary thought, of presumptuousness.

  “Most folks do. A lot of them, they can’t get over it.”

  “And the ferocious stitchers,” the dignitary said. “And the lovely girl stamping out the big raw hi
des.”

  “Everybody plays their part,” the president said complacently. “Anybody has an idea how to make the operation more efficient, we encourage that person to speak right up.”

  The mayor felt constrained to interrupt. “Mr.”—he had forgotten the dignitary’s name, but covered nicely—“Mister here has to catch a plane over to the Talbotsville airport.”

  The handshaking began. “It was a pleasure.”

  “A pleasure for us.”

  “No, truly. I wouldn’t have missed it.”

  “Well, it shows there’s a little more than potato fields out in this part of God’s great country.”

  “Indeed. Much more. And thank you, sir,” he said with excessive warmth to the rather sour floor manager. “A great tour. You really know your football manufacture. And thank you, Mr. Mayor, for working this into your busy schedule.”

  “My pleasure. Learn something new every time I’m taken through.”

  “No, no. My pleasure.” The dignitary found himself shaking the press reporter’s hand now, and smiling, and then the photographer’s, and then that of an underling who had wandered in with a big square bucket of special souvenir footballs, made with one side of white vellum, for a whole team to sign. “Thank you, a real treat, a real treat, thank you,” he heard himself saying, stamping them out.

  THE BELOVED

  THOUGH FRANCIS HIMSELF always associated it—his ability to attract love—with a certain trick of his head, a certain alert and listening angle at which he instinctively tilted his narrow skull, it may have been in the beginning, this ability, simply an inability in those around him, an inability to love anyone else but him. The house into which he was born reached back into the youth of the century, the pre-Wilson era of knobbed balusters and framed mottoes and strange pieces of cloth, perhaps one foot by two, whose arabesque patterns of red and gold and blue reminded him of a pen of peacocks seen from above. The colors were exotic, stiff as feathers; the blue had faded to the pallor of ice, and even the red looked cold, like wet clay. Wallpaper glinted in the dark narrow halls high above his head. The house felt old, worn, too warm, closed in, though cornfields were visible from some windows. Perhaps they were the pen of peacocks: Francis, his parents, and his mother’s parents. They were penned in because they were poor, and they all loved him, Francis suspected, because they had no one else to love.

  His grandfather’s love seemed to arrive from the greatest distance. He dwelt in a far, Biblical, brown world. He smoked cigars outdoors behind the chicken house. His love had a wordless tang, not disagreeable, of admonition. On each of Francis’s birthdays, his grandfather would give him a single dollar bill, removed and unfolded with ceremonial dignity from a wallet worn papery by the rubbing of time, where the child was amazed that wealth still lingered; he imagined that the dollar grew there each spring from a seed left at his previous birthday. It was like manna. His grandfather read an old Bible in leather covers worn fragile as the wallet; for hours each afternoon the old man would sit on the cane-back sofa in the dusk—surrounding walls of trees made the house dark all year; only for the day after a snowstorm did it seem bright—and would dwell in this dry realm, reading, his shuffling feet kicking up on the worn gray carpet little “mice” of fuzz that Mother, the old man’s daughter, would complain about in a voice that swooped like the vacuum cleaner. It was the same voice she used when he brought his cigar indoors. Her voice swooped and wanted to eat him; love, Francis saw, was a kind of eating.

  As a child he slept in a little room his grandparents had to pass by on their way downstairs. Once, in passing, his grandfather, always the first to arise, squeezed his big toe, which the night had exposed. Awakened by it, Francis never forgot the sensation: the old man’s hand dry as a bird’s beak, the preying tug that wanted to pluck his toe loose and carry it into the sky. Yet the old man loved him. Between them, the oldest and youngest of the household, there existed a conspiracy of the powerless, a bond of detached amusement; it had been amusing of his grandfather to pinch his toe. Love is comic, in its search for a handle on the body of the beloved. And unexpected: it kindles in our sleep and startles us awake. And it asks no reward: his grandfather had placidly continued down the stairs, with his usual careful sighing and the mingled squeaks of worn wood treads and of old high-top shoes such as babies wear, only black.

  His grandmother’s love took the form of excessive protectiveness and forced feeding. Once, fed overmuch, he vomited, and the incident, though he knew about it only through his mother’s amused retelling (it seemed to mark the moment when she won the child’s rearing back from her mother), served to sanction the rebelliousness that underlay his growingly expert acceptance of love. That vomiting was his first “No,” and his grandmother was the first to submit to the panicky fury love roused in him. He would beat her; still tiny, he would leap up and his grandmother would bend her already bent back as if to hold him from falling off while he pummelled her sharp shoulder blades with his smarting fists. The cause, as he remembered, was that she would fall asleep while sitting outside the bathroom while he was in it, doing toidy. It was her duty to guard him against ghosts, because she had taught him to believe in ghosts. Muttering in half-German, she had filled the air with phantom dangers—with germs, with likely accidents, with invisible invasions from the outside. Because of her he could never climb a tree and always slept with his windows closed. So he climbed her and relished her high-pitched grunting as his fists struck. Her tousled gray hair seemed to be fleeing her skull in terror; when she turned to shrug him off, her sharp little nose was cruelly nicked by ill-fitting spectacle frames. The certainty of her forgiveness was maddening. In her he first sounded the depths that have no bottom.

  His father’s love was as high as his grandmother’s was deep. There was no word for it but “lordly.” It asked nothing, specified nothing, regretted nothing, saw everything. Its center and seat was the high remote head, impeccably combed, which the child customarily viewed in strange perspective, from underneath, and which floated, inaccessible and preoccupied, on the upper limits of his vision. The holy feelings Francis directed toward this far head were complex. He always remembered with a squirm of horror the moment of blasphemy when, walking with his parents after a snowstorm, falling increasingly behind, throwing snowballs almost blindly, he gathered all his strength and threw in the direction of his father’s head and struck it. His father, as if in slow motion, turned and presented his profile at the moment the missile closed upon its ear, which then, in memory, turned blood red. Francis had wept and explained and not been blamed. Yet, a few years later, waiting on a gravel path for his father to finish talking to another man, he had experimentally tossed flecks of gravel toward the preoccupied head, seeing how close he could come, not wishing to hit it yet obscurely seeking some impingement. His father asked him to stop and, when he did not, swiftly stepped to him, stooped, and slapped his face. As a blow it was neither hard nor soft; it had a perfect quality of justice, and the child felt confirmed by this condescension. It was the only time his father ever struck him, and it was enough, for what had been in doubt was the possibility that it could happen at all.

  His mother, when he was sick in bed with a cold, would apply a vaporish pale-green unguent to his chest. It was at first touch shockingly cold, and then it burned, and its fanning vapors brought tears to his eyes as, her face solicitous and stern, she rubbed the greenish grease into the taut transparent space upheld by his ribs, a space of skin bounded by his nipples and the hollow at the base of his throat. In this hollow she always left, like a supplicatory offering, a final fragrant dab. He did not understand how the grease could penetrate the skin and muscles of his chest to do him any good, but accepted the ministration, as it was given, in faith. Her face, so close to his, was distended like his own face mirrored on the back of a spoon. She seemed involved with him, through the fumes of this rite, in an exchange of guilt and amends. She blamed herself for his frail health. He was often sick, as if he were seeking
a truce; for the atmo-sphere of love into which he had been born was overexciting, like that of a battle. When he came to go to school, he noticed the cheerful ruggedness of the neglected children and the exhausted fragility of the cherished: Marvin, with his wild untruthfulness and chronic anemia, and Hans, who could hardly move across the playground without breaking a bone, and himself, in whom a constant seething irritability would break for relief into fever. As his mother’s slow hand, as slow as the something moving in her face, applied the ointment and its fanning vapors burned his eyes, Francis felt himself the focus of a number of lenses, the center of a burning that might consume him. So the child’s imagination, flowing toward antidotes, was attracted to images of coolness and indifference—the moon, snow, trees serene in green clouds of their own dreaming, melons, masks, lakes, skyscrapers, mirrors, angels, churches on weekdays, theatres on Sundays.

  His mother’s books included a limply bound Shakespeare, with a red ribbon marker sewn to the binding; amid these almost transparent pages he discovered a world preferable to his own. Leafing through, one winter afternoon in the endless hour between four and five, he was halted by a line—O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?—that he had thought was purely a child’s joke. He read on, becoming frightened. Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptiz’d … My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself … The orchard walls are high and hard to climb … Thou know’st the mask of night is on my face … Dost thou love me? I know thou wilt say “Ay.” These discontinuous fragments, glittering and dark, coalesced in a bewildering lunar brilliance. Fever and a silver chill contended within the child; he had become both voices crying against each other amid the fruit trees. His tight dark home, so crammed with love of him, had broken open, released him into the infinite freedom, the total coolness, of impersonation. As the light in the living room failed, he blindly faced his life, discovering himself to be, to have been since birth, an actor, an excuse for the emotions of others.